Jackson Labs Wins $7.5 Million Research Grant

Genomics Researcher's Mice Will Be Used In Study

The Jackson Laboratory, the state's partner in a massive bioscience expansion, has won a $7.5 million grant from the South Korean government for a large-scale cancer genomics project.

The grant will pay for research using Jackson Laboratory mice that can host human tumors.

Lee, who also is a distinguished visiting professor at Seoul National University, will work with principal investigator Jong-Il Kim, M.D., Ph.D., of the Seoul National University College of Medicine and other academic collaborators in Seoul.

"In the next few weeks you will be seeing quite a few more announcements about grant money,'' said Mike Hyde, Jackson's vice president of external affairs.

"It plugs Connecticut into a global science network. We become a player in that,'' said Hyde, who noted that Jackson has hired nearly 100 people so far. "These are world class scientists that are joining us.''

During the first phase of the grant, from 2013 to 2015, Kim and colleagues will collect and store tumors from patients with gastric, breast, colon, lung and rare cancers and determine the genomic signatures of those cancers.

Lee will lead the development of hundreds of new mouse model systems for gastric, breast and other cancers that will be made available to the worldwide scientific community. The models will allow for more detailed study of the cellular and genomic characteristics of specific cancers. The research team will also build a publicly accessible library of anticancer drugs.

Lee said that the researchers expect to find genetic similarities among certain cancers. "If we look at 1,000 gastric cancers, their genetic signatures may group into, say, 20 clusters," he said. "We can then do preclinical testing on just a few tumors from each of those groups, testing different drugs or combinations of drugs to determine which therapies are most effective for treating those tumors with a given genetic signature."

The Jackson facility is expected to open at the UConn Health Center campus in Farmington this coming fall. The state is providing the Maine-based research institution with a $291 million loan, the bulk of which will be forgiven as long as Jackson hires 300 people within 10 years.